The following relates generally to wireless communication, and more specifically to measurement gaps in carrier aggregation.
Wireless communications systems are widely deployed to provide various types of communication content such as voice, video, packet data, messaging, broadcast, and so on. These systems may be capable of supporting communication with multiple users by sharing the available system resources (e.g., time, frequency, and power). Examples of such multiple access systems include code division multiple access (CDMA) systems, time division multiple access (TDMA) systems, frequency division multiple access (FDMA) systems, and orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) systems, (e.g., a Long Term Evolution (LTE) system). A wireless multiple access communications system may include a number of base stations, each simultaneously supporting communication for multiple communication devices, which may be otherwise known as user equipment (UE).
In some cases, a user equipment (UE) may be configured with multiple component carriers (CCs) in a carrier aggregation (CA) configuration. A UE in a CA configuration may use multiple receivers to communicate on the different CCs. In some systems, fixed-length measurement gaps may be provided to assist the UE to perform measurements on neighboring cells. During scheduled measurement gaps, the UE pauses its communication with a serving base station and is not expected to monitor communication with the serving base station while it tunes its radio or takes other action to measure a target frequency band. Such pauses in communicating with the serving base station may cause delay or reduced throughput which may be exacerbated when the UE is configured with a large number of component carriers.